Real Chemistry for Kids (Upper elementary, Middle school, full year)

When I was in high school and college, I really struggled with chemistry. How can anything THAT small be THAT complicated? So much of chemistry was presented to me as a given, as if we know all of this by magic. I scraped by with Cs and was happy to get them.

But when my oldest daughter was about 8, she became totally enthralled with chemistry. She's never been the kind of person who can just do an activity and not want to know why this works -- so together we spent three years following the why until I understood it well enough to teach it. At this point, she moved on to invertebrates, leaving me to develop courses for upper elementary and middle school. I don't teach high school chemistry because I'm much more interested in the underlying concepts than doing rigorous calculations, but I have helped high school students say "OH! Now I get it!" when they see my explanations.

I use water as the basis for a lot of the labs because water is so familiar and yet SO WEIRD. It's also safe and widely available. I've developed prototypes of hands-on model H2O molecules that contain magnets in order to demonstrate polarity and what makes water so amazing.